US Spent Billions on Failed Foreign Security Forces - US Media

Many in the US question the effectiveness of the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars Washington spent on foreign military training programs now that thousands of Pentagon-trained security forces in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have collapsed, stalled or defected.

The setbacks have been most pronounced in three countries most important to Washington.

The Pentagon-trained army and police in Iraq’s Anbar Province, the heartland of the Islamic State militant group, have barely engaged its forces, while several thousand American-backed government forces and militiamen in Afghanistan’s Kunduz Province had to fall back last week when attacked by several hundred Taliban fighters.

And in Syria, a $500 million US program to train local rebels to fight the Islamic State terrorist group has produced a mere sixty fighters, give or take…

“Our track record at building security forces over the past 15 years is miserable,” The New York Times quoted Karl W. Eikenberry, a former military commander and United States ambassador in Afghanistan, as saying earlier this week.